‘So what was Thomas doing there?’ This had been Grey’s final line of questioning, before knowing he needed to give Anthony Aubrey a break. They had been talking for what felt like hours, and hadn’t started till late.
‘After I spoke to Thomas on Monday evening, things must have still been playing on his mind, for he called again on Tuesday.’
‘He called you at the hotel?’
‘No, on my mobile. I do have one, I don’t use it very often. He had spoken to Alex as I told him to, but he still had the secret to bear and he couldn’t face his father.
‘Now I was in something of a bind. I suppose you know..?’
‘We know that Isobel was there.’
‘Well, he couldn’t come up to the room, but I knew I had to see him. So I told him, I’m at the hotel but I’m just in the middle of a meeting, but my car’s parked outside, so go and wait by it and I’ll be there at seven — I thought I’d take him for a meal at the restaurant. Only, when I got to the car he was nowhere.’
‘You didn’t see anything?’
‘Not a sign.’
Events were coming clear to Grey, he knowing the questions he needed to ask now, no matter how little sense they made to Aubrey.
‘This was the Jaguar you asked him to wait by? Quite a distinctive vehicle.’
‘Oh yes, there’s no chance Tom could have missed it.’
‘Did Stephen Carman know Thomas Long?’
Aubrey shook his head, ‘I can’t imagine how.’
‘So tell me, did you ever meet Stephen Carman?’
‘But what’s that got to do with..?’
‘Please, just a last couple of answers and you can go and have something to eat.’
His brief nodded as Aubrey resumed, sourly, ‘Oh yes, we’d met alright. Isobel brought him to the house. He’d got a beaten-up car from somewhere, at least the neighbours across the road couldn’t see it behind the hedge. I’d already heard all about him of course, how much fun he was, how exciting, how she loved him.’
‘How did you get on?’
‘We hardly spoke. He wouldn’t give me the time of day. He had a horrible habit of skulking off and turning up in rooms he had no business being in. I had to check afterward that nothing had gone walkies. I did wonder after if he’d been casing the joint, but if so then he never had the nerve to follow it through.’
‘You didn’t like him?’
‘I could tell he was a bad’un — I expect you could too, Inspector? You must have a nose for it.’
Aubrey paused before adding, ‘You asked if Carman would know Thomas? Well, Thomas knew him all right. You see, the thing is Inspector…’
‘Help me out here, Grey,’ asked the Superintendent as his detectives arrived at his office and sat down. ‘My own staff are asking me what this pair are guilty of, and I don’t know myself.’
‘Nor do I exactly,’ answered the Inspector, lowering himself onto the sofa. ‘I just know neither of them are innocent.’
‘So what do we know?’
‘We know that Isobel had arranged to meet Anthony at the hotel on Tuesday,’ answered Cori. ‘Although she was shaky on the details of how they planned to get her away from Carman.’
‘And I have a theory about Thomas,’ added Grey. ‘I think Carman followed Isobel down here, but didn’t know why she came. Now we know how fiercely he guarded her, and we can guess how he would have reacted if he thought she had another man.’
‘So Carman thought Thomas was the other man?’ Rose was perplexed.
‘Perhaps not; but Aubrey did tell me Isobel brought Carman to his house once, and that he made sure he gave himself a good nose around — casing the joint, Aubrey thought. I reckon Carman clocked the car that day, and that was what he recognised Tuesday evening.’
‘When Thomas was standing next to it,’ Cori recalled.
‘So you’ve got to ask,’ Grey summed up. ‘If Carman didn’t know their secret, if Isobel had only introduced Aubrey to him as a family friend or whatever, but one she was obviously very fond of…’
‘…then Carman may well have asked why was she sneaking off now to meet him at a hotel?’ concluded Rose.
‘It’s a fair question.’
‘So it wasn’t about Thomas at all?’
‘No, Carman probably only called out to Thomas to find out what the bloody hell was going on. But Thomas was a bag of nerves by this point — don’t forget, he’d already had Larry Dunn shouting after him down the High Street that afternoon. I reckon he tried to dodge Carman’s questions too, only this time he didn’t have a bus to dash onto.’
‘So Carman chased him for answers…’
‘…and we saw what that led to.’
‘And all this because Isobel wanted to get away from her bullying boyfriend,’ lamented Rose.
‘But she didn’t did she,’ said Cori with a start. ‘I only mean she didn’t get away — we found her back in Nottingham.’
‘And you say Carman had followed her down here,’ asked Rose. ‘So did he also come by train?’
‘No, by car,’ answered Cori, ‘and five hours later.’
‘So how did Carman know where she was?’
Grey had been listening to them picking holes in his idea, ‘Okay, okay, we’ll just have to call it a theory in progress; but I’m sure I’m right about Thomas, and it’s still the best we’ve got.’
Rose sat back in his chair, ‘Well I’ll tell you what I think: I think that we have a working idea of what happened to Thomas, perhaps the best we’ll have. But it’s a theory that neither Isobel or Aubrey can confirm as they weren’t there, and which if anything only tells us that they weren’t involved. In fact, were they guilty of any more than planning a secret meeting? I have to say Grey, I don’t see that the pair have committed a crime here.’
‘There is more to learn sir, I’m sure of it. Just let me go at them once more.’
‘Okay, I’ll let you have another hour, but soon we’re going to need to have something concrete to pin on them. Get back at Isobel, try another angle, catch her off guard.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve just the thing, a little detail Aubrey shared with me.’
‘I wonder, Isobel, if you knew that Anthony used Thomas to spy on you?’
‘What?’
Grey and Isobel at last had a chance to face each other.
‘Good lad, Thomas, she never rumbled you.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Aubrey used to send Thomas to buy CDs from the record store, while you were hanging out there. He didn’t trust Carman, you see.’
‘Why are you talking to me like this?’
‘Because your story doesn’t add up, Isobel. We’re having to ask a lot of questions. Such as why after being offered ten thousand pounds to leave that week we found you still in Nottingham.’
‘I changed my mind.’
‘Why?’
‘I bottled out, okay?’
‘But after all that planning, all those months of conversations?’
‘I told you — I lost my nerve.’
‘So you just went back?
‘Yes.’
‘And you weren’t worried about your boyfriend asking where you’d been for for nearly twenty-four hours, why your clothes had gone? This man who’d hurt you before and who you were bent on leaving?’
‘But he wasn’t there when I got back.’
‘And how were you to know that?’
‘I didn’t know.’ She looked up at him surlily. ‘I hated going back, but I knew his temper then would be nothing compared to if he ever tracked me down after running away.’
‘So tell us again who gave you your eye.’
Isobel gasped, ‘But I’ve told you what he was like.’
‘You forget, we’ve spoken to the officers who were watching your flat. The cut wasn’t there when you left on Tuesday, but was there when you came back on Wednesday. So I have to ask, how did it get there?’
‘What do you want? My medical records? You said there was someone who could help me, a support officer. Well I want them here, I’d like to see them.’ She looked to her brief who nodded.
‘And you maintain the fiction that you have no idea where Carman is now?’
‘Inspector, my client has made a request.’ This was the first thing Grey had heard either Isobel or Aubrey’s solicitors say today; hired by the latter, and as silent in interview as they must have been wise in private counsel.
‘But there are questions that need answers. A man has died!’
‘A death you know Miss Semple played no part in.’
‘Not directly.’
‘Inspector, of just what are you accusing my client?’
Grey didn’t know; as Isobel chipped in too, ‘You still can’t trust me, just because I snapped at you earlier? I thought we were over that.’
But the Inspector didn’t reply, only offering, ‘I believe the support officer we called this morning left after you didn’t return. It might be hard to find another one this late of an evening, but there should be someone here by morning, even on a weekend.’
The brief nodded again as the detectives ended the interview and rose to leave. Grey wondered if Isobel would even still be here by the time the support officer arrived, his need for answers only equalled by his conviction that they may never be forthcoming.
‘This is a mess, Grey,’ said Rose, having listened in on the interview. ‘Isobel’s played her last card — there’ll be nothing more achieved this evening.’ He paused, exasperated, ‘You can’t even tell me what you think the pair of them were involved in! Besides, I’ve got Aubrey’s lawyer on my back. We can’t keep them in beyond tomorrow anyway, so I’m letting them leave.’
Grey knew his time had run out.
‘You’ve found Thomas, and Isobel — you’ve done well. Who knows what she and Aubrey were up to that night, that’s their business. Now let it go, Grey. Get home and get some sleep, and we’ll see the Longs in the morning.’
Knowing he could leave Cori to make her own arrangements, and feeling he couldn’t go home now even though ordered to, Grey left the buzz of the office behind and retreated to his office to think:
To think of Thomas leading Stephen Carman a merry dance all across the services that night, evading a vicious hood whose stock-in-trade was finding people and hurting them. Good going, Tom.
Grey thought of Carman too, and of that still image of him haunched like an animal savouring its kill. But now Grey wondered if it didn’t instead show him in adrenalin withdrawal, shaking, terrified of what he had just done, both to his own life as well as to Thomas Long’s? Grey thought of the cool air coming into the tunnel through that newly opened window, and of how no one had seen Stephen Carman since those pictures were taken.
Then there were the Aubreys: Alexander in London, insulated from all that had been happening; and his father Anthony, sat — for now — in a police cell, a man who had known such highs and lows in life that he was able to stare ruin in the face and know that none of it mattered. He wouldn’t even care of this news getting out tomorrow, news of his being here helping the police with their enquiries into the suspicious death of one of his staff.
Grey thought finally of Tom’s parents. They would be asked to identify their son in the morning, and he would have to get some proper sleep before that. He would leave soon he decided, have someone drive him home.
There was a knock on the door, as a Constable called to tell him his witnesses were being released. Grey knew he ought to be there, but was in no rush to rise from his seat,
‘I’ll be right along,’ he said, soon dragging himself up and out to the corridor. Nearly midnight, he noticed as he saw the clock at the top of the stairs… as an arm grabbed him and pulled him into a side room,
‘Sir, I think we’ve struck gold.’
‘What?’
‘Or something, anyway. Though nothing like what we were expecting!’
Before him were Sergeant Smith and Sarah Cobb, herself returned to work after spending most of the day catching up on sleep.
‘You remember at the plant,’ spoke Cori quickly, ‘you thought about how there could have been truck drivers sleeping in their cabs that night at the services?’
His efforts to think back even those few hours were not meeting with great success, but Cori hurried on,
‘Well I asked Sarah to search to see if anything had come over the wires these last four days, on the National Computer, Interpol, Europol or anywhere, search keywords: lorry; driver; motorway; crime.’
‘And look what came up, sir…’ Sarah passed Grey a print out he barely had time to focus on before Cori summarised,
‘They found a body, sir. The French police, in the back of a truck come over from Dover — it hadn’t been checked on our side apparently…’
‘A body? But Thomas was found…’
‘The victim had been stripped and beaten around the head it sounds like, no immediate means of identification. But look at the details, sir: white, male, estimated mid-twenties, mousey blond hair, no distinguishing features…’
‘Stephen Carman?’
‘It could be, sir.’ Cori smiled the way only a police officer could at the discovery of a corpse.
‘Oh Lord,’ Grey raised his gaze, his head resting back against the doorframe. ‘What does this mean?’
‘That someone murdered him, sir?’ answered Sarah; but he had been asking himself, an inner dialogue developing, the Inspector working through the logic that Cori had had a head-start on.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘someone could almost certainly have wanted to murder him.’ He looked back down to fix his eyes on those of his Sergeant, their shared gaze confirming they were thinking along the same lines, each free to use the other to test their shared conclusions, she asking,
‘But not..? But surely not Aubrey and Isobel? They couldn’t have… could they?’
Grey’s look confirmed he thought they could.
‘But a senior citizen and a slip of a girl?’
‘That Aubrey’s a big bloke, and they each hated Carmen enough by the end.’
‘Well, that’s for sure. And so not his drug buddies? Not a feud?’
‘Nash never mentioned a fall out among the drugs ring, quite the opposite — weren’t they planning some big deal? And anyway, I think they’d be tidier than this. This is amateur hour.’ He opened the door, ‘Come on, we’ve got to tell Rose — or they’ll be out in a minute.’
The three of them left quickly, before Grey paused in the corridor, ‘But wait a moment, aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? We don’t know it was Carman; and how sure are we the truck was even here that night?’
‘The truck had started from Sheffield on Tuesday morning,’ filled in Sarah as she and Cori cajoled him down the stairs. ‘It had stops all over Britain before it left for France. Now the Interpol report only had its list of drop-offs, not where it went in-between, but the last one of these was just north of here. There was only one driver, and the truck would have a tachograph — he would have had to have stopped somewhere that evening.’
‘So you’ve sent for more details?’
Sarah nodded.
‘And they didn’t find him till now?’
‘Oh no, the French found him yesterday morning, they’ve had the body for two days. It sounds like they haven’t known what to do with him, who he was, where he came from, even where to start looking. If you think about it…’
‘…find the right truck,’ Cori continued, ‘make sure he’s well hid, and there’s a good chance the driver wouldn’t have the first idea of where along the route their extra passenger was put on board.’
‘The notes read as though the body had been dragged right to the back of the trailer, so you wouldn’t see it just by opening the hatch and pulling out the first few loads.’
The three of them came through the double doors and out into the mess room. It was unusually busy for this time of night even for a police station, with patrols still leaving for the factory and support staff called back long after hours.
Just then along the far wall came Isobel Semple and Anthony Aubrey, solicitors and Constables shepherding them on their short walk to freedom. As they strolled toward the door — for as the briefs would have suggested, any rush would be unseemly — Aubrey looked up and caught the Inspector’s eye. What was that look, Grey wondered? Victory, resignation? Had the man ever thought this might end well? Grey wasn’t sure, but it changed as Aubrey saw the steely glint now facing back at him. Grey had him and both knew it,
‘In light of new evidence… ’ he whispered to Cori as she went to intercept the party, he himself preparing to go and give his boss the bad news,
‘They couldn’t have, could they?’ Grey murmured, his mind awhirr. ‘They couldn’t have brought him here to kill him?’
‘Well, we don’t know that yet, sir,’ said Sarah stood beside him.
‘I think I do,’ he answered, and turned for the stairs.